Customer Reviews

1000 Vegetarian Recipes From Around the World

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My husband and I are vegetarians who love variety! We prefer cooking dishes from scratch in less than 1 hour. This book fits our constraints perfectly. Without it, we would be lost in the kitchen.

this book has a lot to choose from. very well put together with calorie counts, time needed to prepare, and plenty of pictures.

i like the fact that all cultures are represented in the book. pages are easy to wipe off too. happy cooking!

due to the fact that many of my friends that see the book want it immediately, and, for those that live out of country I usually oblige.


First of all this is not just a cookbook for vegetarians since almost all the recepies can be used as fabulous, new and tasty side dishes. The author had to use a lot of creativity in these recepies since in being able to present a dish that not only looks tasteful but also is considered as a main dish for the vegetarians in your crowd. There are some pastry and filo dough items that are quite unique .....


The presentation of this book as well is fabulous. ALL and I mean ALL the recepies take up only one page, each page has a presentation picture, and, for any slightly more complicated recepies small thumbnails showing the prep steps. In colour of course ..... Also, each recepie gives a carb, calorie, sugar etc breakdown, an estimated time for completion of the dish and a small graphic as to how many steps are required to prepare the dish .... The instrcutions are clear cut and concise ...


Since this is an 'international' edition of, I guess, a USA book the recepies are very very varied and include dishes from both the Far and Middle East, from Thailand, Latin America etc etc ..... This certainly is a MUST HAVE book from the expert chef to even the most novice of cooks today ....

This book has a lot of promise, and I really want to like it. I'll start with what's good:

The book is organized fabulously. Each recipe is on its own page, with a large color photo, a few step-by-step photos, nutrition information, and a difficulty gage. The recipes are organized into general sections, like Soups, Pasta & Rice, Outdoor Cooking, etc., though there's no table of contents or index. There are a lot of recipes that look and sound delicious, and make you want to jump right in and start cooking.

Once I started cooking out of it, though, my thoughts changed a bit. I'm a beginning cook who doesn't have a lot of extra cash (college student). One major problem with the book that I began to notice right off the bat is that the vast majority of recipes are very "gourmet", whith long ingredient lists and uncommon ingredients. Several of the pasta recipes call for fresh pasta, there's liberal use of fresh herbs and gourmet mushrooms, and a lot of them simply don't seem to be aimed at the quick-and-easy set (which is fine, if that's what you want).

The real clincher for me though was that none of the recipes really turned out that well for me. I skip back and forth between this book and another (Fanny Farmer) for recipe ideas, and even for nearly identical dishes the ones from this book took longer to make and turned out bland and unappetizing. There were several that I didn't have any comparison for that ended up being a disaster.

Of course, I haven't tried all of the recipes here, so there could be some real gems I haven't come across (or that I screwed up in the process). I hope that's the case, because I'm going to keep trying it every so often amongst my other books. But as of right now, I wouldn't recommend this over any other vegetarian cookbook. While it's nice to look at and get inspired by, the time, effort, and taste just hasn't been worth it.

This is MY FAVORITE and most-used cookbook. I bought it for beans at Ross thinking it was probably one of those useless coffee table books, but after thumbing through it, I decided to give it a chance. I'm SO GLAD I did!! Two of my (non-vegetarian) friends went and bought it after I made them meals from it.

The depth, breadth, and diversity of recipes is astounding. Lots of Mediterranean and Indian recipes. (thank goodness!) Beautiful photos, easy directions, and delicious meals. This thing even tells you how to make paneer (Indian fresh cheese). I made it and it was easy, scrumptious, and I must admit... fun!

You WILL NOT find a better cookbook. I can't understand why it's out of print. That's just crazy. Note: this thing is huge like the Oxford dictionary, and every bit as useful.

Happy Eating!!

For example, we made the Vegetable Jambalaya (p. 255) last week for snowed-in football watching. Went along with the Fish Tacos. It was delicious, and a great alternative to chili.

As a hesitant omnivore, I picked up this cookbook on sale after paging through the recipes and seeing many different dishes with few recipes involving tofu or beans. It was literally the wisest purchase I have ever made; it made my transition to vegetarianism a smooth and thrilling one. I could not cook/live without this cookbook.

The pictures are excellent, and the recipes are varied: Indian Hyderabad pickles to stellar Italian pasta dishes. Over the past year, I've tried the appetizers, breads, pasta dishes, salads and met tasty success with all of them.

This cookbook is more of an introduction to than a tutorial in international cooking. Some of the recipes are a bit westernized, and the dishes suffer minor compromise. The desserts are a little too health-conscious for my taste, but the rest of the book makes up for it. Despite these drawbacks, I would recommend this cookbook to anyone--vegetarian or not, beginner to advanced cook.

I bought this cookbook because my kids decided to become vegetarians, and my repetoire was limited. I have found the recipes very easy to follow. There are great pictures for many of the steps. Most recipes cook up very quickly. So far they have been pretty bland, so be prepared to add extra spices. I like the international flavor of the book.

I've noted in my last few cookbook reviews that I've been spending some time lately going through my big bookshelf of cookbooks and giving kudos to the ones I love and giving away those I don't.

I took this cookbook off the shelf last week wondering why I didn't remember any dishes I'd made out of it...I've had it for years. (I got it at TJ Maxx for a couple bucks. Can't beat that.) It's gorgeous, it's huge, it has a photo of every recipe, it even contains nutritional information.

In short, this cookbook is put together the way I want all my cookbooks to be. A world of selections and you know what you are getting...

So, I began flipping through the pages to decide what I'd be cooking from it this week. Oddly, although I enjoy reading a cookbook like some do a novel and taste the flavors in my head even before cooking...it was no easy task to find a recipe I wanted to cook.

While the build of the cookbook is wonderful, oddly, it's the recipes that make it lacking for a better rating.

There are, for example, maybe 50 rice recipes alone. Not dishes with rice in them, mind you, but just flavored rice. Jasmine rice, cumin rice, coconut rice, pesto rice... fairly plain. There are a lot of dishes that just have "little" to them or seem to be "filler" recipes in order to get the book bigger, it seems. Which may be, perhaps, why it wound up being sold at a discount store.

Then you have the "wow" dishes that I wanted to cook until I read the nutritionals and found that many had around 800 calories for a small serving. So I passed on those. I'd normally set aside dishes like this for a dinner party but they weren't THAT much of a "wow". Such as Vegetable Ravioli at 822 calories, Spinach lasagna at 720 calories, Walnut and Olive Pasta at 823... Nothing special, just really fattening for small servings.

Then I found some really unusual dishes (scores of these) like Indonesian Onions, honey and nut nests (spaghetti with honey and nuts and lemon juice), olive cake, crisp pickled vegetables, etc...not my thing. And there were TONS of these.

But, sadly, most dishes were more like side dishes than vegetarian meals. Scores of fairly plain potato dishes and the barbecue section consisted primarily of just plain chopped vegetables on skewers. And, trust me, I love me some 'taters...but not these.

Some dishes were very plain, or common like nachos (yes, really...a recipe for putting cheese on chips and maybe even gettin' wicked with it and adding refried beans.)(grin). There were lots of salsa recipes and fairly drab salad recipes. And I'm in a salad phase right now so I was an easy sell on salad but found few that weren't odd or bland ingredient-wise.

So, I'll be totally honest. I tore out 9 recipes I wanted to keep and put them in my binder. I wanted to keep this one! I really did...but I only kept a little over a handful of its contents. Yeah, just nine. I'll give away the rest of the cookbook...I cooked 6 dishes from this book this week and they won't be repeats. But there are still some that do sound good that I am going to give a shot...and those are the 9. These include beautiful dishes that read well with full flavors like the Trio of Potato Purees, Mexican Potato Salad, tomato and pasta bake, and some soups.

That said, I don't meet many cookbooks I don't enjoy. I love to cook. I love to food...and this cookbook would be good if you are looking for simple ideas like Bell Peppers with Thyme, potatoes in olive oil, some flavors of rice, etc. That's not a bad thing. It just, for me, tends to lean to being more of a side dish cookbook and not a very hearty one at that. However, there are lots of vegan recipes interspersed throughout the book so if you are a household including both a vegetarian or sometimes vegetarian and a vegan, this cookbook may be just the ticket for you.

It missed my own kitchen as its target audience...veg eaters but flavor lovers, but I can't help but say it was wonderfully organized. It's dishes, for me, were bland or a little too exotic but, that said, if you never count calories there are some uber yummy sounding dishes at around 800 calories in here that I had to pass over. So I wouldn't rule those out for others in making this a well-rounded successful cookbook addition...and I suspect they'll be quite enjoyable.

And, after all, everything in balance makes eating rather grand.

I have been a vegetarian for going on a decade now and I have bought many many different veggie cookbooks over the years. But this is the ONLY cookbook I use on a weekly basis. Basically 90% of my home-cooked meals come from this book, the rest is generally from the internet.

Before I move again I'm going to sell the rest of my cookbooks because they're really just taking up space (and getting covered in dust)


I am just so happy that I had a roommate with this book years ago, because with it being out of print, I don't know if I would have even known it existed!


(and to the person that thought there were too many expensive ingredients---cookbooks are just a guideline, you have to be willing to substitute sometime, and in that case, the internet is your friend)